General discussion on ID, God, and evolution

I just want to say, for all of the folks of PS, I’m sorry. Ultimately, this is all my fault, and I apologize.

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Not really. Don’t blame yourself. There have been similar run-away threads where you were not involved.

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Ah, but we have legal concepts for this which are highly useful here. There are such things as “primary” and “secondary” liability. So, if I fail to provide a tenant a secure building, and the tenant is robbed, the tenant may sue me for damages. But the robber is the primarily liable person, so if I can find him, I in turn can hold him responsible by way of indemnity to me.

If, arguendo, you have some responsibility for unleashing the dogs of reckless ID Creationist nonsense by asking legitimate questions (I should think not, unless these questions were asked with deliberate disregard for the mental health of all nearby; but I was never much of a tort-law theorist), it is clear that the same principle would apply. Those who actually post the nonsense are primarily liable, and your liability can be secondary at most.

The difference, of course, is that they would never apologize except in the apologetical sense.

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This raises the interesting question of is it possible to secure a thread against Creationist nonsense? If not, the options would appear to be either to be completely silent or to accept that such nonsense may eventuate.

I would therefore suggest that, by our participation in this, or any other forum of potential interest to Creationists, we are equally as liable as @dsterncardinale. :smiley:

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Not, I think, by any craft we here possess.

I think that’s fair. Who here can say that he can resist the temptation, upon seeing something crazy as a tree full of rats, to poke it with a stick and see what happens? If only the DI were not playing the role of Willard.

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Yes, but I don’t think we have to purposefully “poke it with a stick” to be tempting fate.

I suspect many perfectly straight-forward scientific statements or questions would have reasonably significant risk.

At my bleakest moments, I’d consider even as innocuous a statement as “it’s a nice day here” might have a non-zero risk. :fearful:

Nonsense question. The simulation is not intended to account for that.

Wrong, he did not.

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Bleakest moments? Remember that we’re dealing with people who think the election was stolen and, even more incredibly, that Stephen Meyer is an honest man – and who, after having been met by devastating rebuttal from scientists specializing in the various points in issue time after time, just keep popping up saying, “Bleah! There’s no way to account for biological novelty! Bleah!”

In that environment, madness is the rule, and statements are deemed controversial in inverse proportion to how legitimately controversial they actually are.

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Do you believe that evolving the keratin genes to allow a bird to fly (flight feather) did not require any specific mutations? A random walk to flight?

Is your hypothesis that neutral mutations fixed by Kimura’s model formula lead to flight without any type of search? Search types as discussed by @Art in his 2004 discussion of Axe’s work.

Why do you think Michael Lynch did not simply use Kimura’s math (as you did) as a model and counter argument to Mike Behe?

You are too committed to teleological thinking.

Earlier organisms were not searching for ways to fly. They were just using trial and error to find better ways of surviving. It just happened that those better ways finished up with an ability to fly.

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Good point (although you used the same teleological language as Bill). Similarly, the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t actively searching for mutations that would make it more transmissible than other variants. It just happened to be the variant that experienced those transmission-enhancing mutations.

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I’m sure not just any and all mutations would do, which is why there is purifying selection. But I don’t see any reason to think the particular set of mutations that happened to occur and get fixed - to yield some particular keratin gene in some particular species of bird - are the only possible functional set. In fact we have direct empirical evidence against that creationistic fantasy: Keratin genes are not identical even within birds, and different birds have considerable differences in their Keratin protein sequences, meaning there is a large swath of functional keratin alternatives existing in life right now.

Pick any two species of birds that didn’t share common ancestry yesterday, find their respective keratin orthologoues, compare their amino acid sequences. They are not identical.

And I’m quite certain if you bothered, you could probably show the nested hierarchy within bird keratin genes too.

My hypothesis is that bird keratin genes have been diverging under some degree of purifying selection ever since their last common ancestor, and that the same is true for all organisms that carry keratin-related homologoues.

There is simply zero evidence, nor any reason to believe or even conjecture that this divergence had to involve the creationist fantasy of some set of coordinated mutations that were too rare to evolve. Which is why we have the evidence we have: A nested hierarchy in shared similar (but non-identical), and divergent keratin amino acid sequenes.

Because he’s answering a completely different question than you are asking me. He’s not calculating whether there is enough time for two keratin orthologues to diverge as much as we see. Which is the question you posed in this thread, incompetently and confusedly trying to insinuate Behe’s crap appplies to the evolutionary divergence of keratin.

But if you think it does, you’re welcome to show some experimental evidence that some particular extant keratin orthologoue would have to evolve with “coordinated” mutations. Do you have any such evidence? Nope. You just imagine this would have to happen. That’s all you have: a fantasy.

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You have created a straw-man argument.

All you need is it being rare enough that the required random change to find the flight feather versions is more change than the fixation math can handle.

Your model is a toy model that does not incorporate a realistic scenario. You do not even factor in the odds and fixation time of gene duplication into your model.

Why would keratin be under purifying selection?

The burden is yours to show it did evolve without coordinated mutations leading to flight. The idea that flight emerged more than once through random changes to a sequence is magical thinking.

In short, Bill is still applying the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in all his reasoning, after all this time.

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The Texas shooter fallacy is on your side. You are attributing a set of bullet holes that spell I can fly to a blind folded shooter. This is magical thinking.

I don’t have a problem with teleology in the sense of trying to find ways to survive or to better our lives. The problem for Bill, is that he wants a teleology that is too narrowly focused. And that’s part of why he is confused.

I don’t care whether you think there was only ONE or A FEW possible sets. The conclusion of your argument is the same: You think the set of mutations that occurred is too rare to have evolved, and you’re focusing on some particular protein we see and then imagining that set, and perhaps only a few others, are the only ones possible, and you are demanding we disprove your unsupported fantasy that makes no biochemical sense.

You are committing the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

You are drawing a target around the mutations that occurred and asking out loud how such a putatively rare or unique target could have been hit. But you have no evidence that there are only one or a few targets, too rare to have evolved. This is just your imagination, which there is no biochemical reason to even suggest could be the case.

Do you really not understand that? Bill why would ANY gene sequence ever be under purifying selection? Do you really need that explained?

No, it isn’t. It’s just your fantasy that there are coordinated mutations required in the evolution of keratin amino acid sequence. There’s just no reason to think that, nor is there a reason to even hypothesize it. It’s literally just made up for no other reason than your irrational fear of evolution.

There is no protein coding gene ever tested, for any protein, where it has ever been shown that there is only one, or too few, sets of mutations for that protein to have evolved.

Did you know that experts in protein biochemistry are actually interested in this question about just how constrained protein sequences are in evolution, and whether there is only a very select few possible mutational routes to follow, or if extant protein functions can be reached through many alternative trajectories from ancestral states? They are doing work to test exactly that question:

Here’s a recent example:

eLife digest

One of the most fundamental and unresolved questions in evolutionary biology is whether the outcomes of evolution are predictable. Is the diversity of life we see today the expected result of organisms adapting to their environment throughout history (also known as natural selection) or the product of random chance? Or did chance events early in history shape the paths that evolution could take next, determining the biological forms that emerged under natural selection much later?

These questions are hard to study because evolution happened only once, long ago. To overcome this barrier, Xie, Pu, Metzger et al. developed an experimental approach that can evolve reconstructed ancestral proteins that existed deep in the past. Using this method, it is possible to replay evolution multiple times, from various historical starting points, under conditions similar to those that existed long ago. The end products of the evolutionary trajectories can then be compared to determine how predictable evolution actually is.

Xie, Pu, Metzger et al. studied proteins belonging to the BCL-2 family, which originated some 800 million years ago. These proteins have diversified greatly over time in both their genetic sequences and their ability to bind to specific partner proteins called co-regulators. Xie, Pu, Metzger et al. synthesized BCL-2 proteins that existed at various times in the past. Each ancestral protein was then allowed to evolve repeatedly under natural selection to acquire the same co-regulator binding functions that evolved during history.

At the end of each evolutionary trajectory, the genetic sequence of the resulting BCL-2 proteins was recorded. This revealed that the outcomes of evolution were almost completely unpredictable: trajectories initiated from the same ancestral protein produced proteins with very different sequences, and proteins launched from different ancestral starting points were even more dissimilar.

Further experiments identified the mutations in each trajectory that caused changes in coregulator binding. When these mutations were introduced into other ancestral proteins, they did not yield the same change in function. This suggests that early chance events influenced each protein’s evolution in an unpredictable way by opening and closing the paths available to it in the future.

This research expands our understanding of evolution on a molecular level whilst providing a new experimental approach for studying evolutionary drivers in more detail. The results suggest that BCL-2 proteins, in all their various forms, are unique products of a particular, unpredictable course of history set in motion by ancient chance events.

Before this study was performed, someone like you could have made the exact same argument you are making, insisting that BCL-2 genes couldn’t possibly evolve the many extant variants because in your imagination there are “coordinated” mutations required and you demand that this be proved wrong. But there’s just no evidence for that, and there is just no reason to think any particular protein you have suddenly become infatuated with is any different from this one.

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Don’t get me wrong. I am not against the use of teleological descriptions (provided there is some caveat somewhere, explaining the real state of affairs) of biological phenomena. I was only pointing out you used a teleological language just as Bill, although I knew you didn’t mean it in that sense.

I fully realize that it’s impossible to teach you anything. I’m just talking to the other people here. To consider a better analogy, let the blindfolded shooter fill the wall with holes, and then eliminate most of them, preserving only the ones that assemble into approximate letters. All the while he adds new holes, and you’re preserving the ones that make the letters clearer, the ones that assemble into words, and finally the ones that give a real English sentence. Doesn’t have to be “I can fly.” Could be any sentence at all. It could even be a picture or a nice geometric shape. As long as it fits some interesting specification, which doesn’t have to be done in advance.

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What evidence do you have that specific mutations are required for flight? Why mention specific mutations in the absence of some demonstration that they exist?

Why have you ignored the obvious search of selection by differential reproductive success? By what reason do you suggest this as insufficient, especially given the absence of any demonstration that ‘specific mutations’ are required?

Because Lynch was showing how fixation of two coordinated mutations would operate under selection, and not merely show the expected rate of divergence of a gene in two lineages.

Provide any evidence that it is rare enough…

Because it does things?

You are the one claiming coordinated mutations are required, it is your burden to support this claim.

Support this claim.

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